The truly great are fighters for life, touched with fire, and not smothered by mundane things, said Stephen Spender in his famous poem, “I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great.” Francis Ford Coppola embodies that ideal by his spiritual imperative to make life as bright as a sun, more passionate, pulsing with and connected to the universal, and exciting.
Coppola’s achievements are widely known and chronicled, but when I read that he considers business an art that comes from the things of your soul, I realized to satisfy my curiosity about his immense drive and astonishingly diverse achievements, I needed to go back and re-read a bit of 377 B.C. vintage, Plato.
Plato believed in eternal, human, inborn spiritual blueprints, or forms, which echoed the pantheon of the gods whose energies could be harnessed by mortals. Jungian philosophy is based on Plato’s forms. Jung said he stood in awe of the depths and heights of the soul beyond this world and space, and its immeasurable richness stored and organized into images gathered from millions of years of living. “These images are not pale shadows. But powerful…conditions of the soul…we can only misunderstand. But never rob of their power by denying them.”
Viewing Mr. Coppola through the prism of Plato’s classic forms, Jungian archetypes, and Stephen Spender’s Truly Great, I see a powerful condition of the soul that looks to my eyes like the flip-sides of Apollo, god of reason, harmony, order, prophecy; and Dionysus, god of wine and fertile agriculture, intoxication, sensual pleasures, theatre, and festivity.
When Coppola expresses a desire to build a beautiful city for people to live engaged in creativity, education, ritual, festivity, and athletic perfection, he is describing a Golden Age. Plato created this recipe of Golden Ages: societies organized around the needs of the human soul. Plato’s simple idea founded the Golden Age of Greece, the Italian Renaissance, and France’s 18th century Enlightenment on which America was based.
This simple Golden Age recipe liberates the spirit that is then set free to produce epic creations. Coppola says his secret is enthusiasm, which means ‘in spirit,’ like Dionysus who’s unquenchable spirit sets us free.
Coppola has acted like a funnel, and also an amplifier of those immense archetypal spiritual riches. As cosmos means one united, harmonious whole, Dionysus stands for complexity, and also for the writer who can solve earthly dilemmas. As a writer, director, and entrepreneur, Coppola takes the creative chaos, passion, and theatricality provides a theme and funnels it into a reasoned, harmonious whole, be it his wines, his film, his resorts, or his life.
And as he has funneled undifferentiated creativity into powerful patterns of being, he has also amplified his heart-based rearing by Italian-American show-business parents into his mega-successful wineries. In 1975, he bought the historic Inglenook/Niebaum Estate where he produces opulent red wines under the Niebaum-Coppola and Coppola labels, and in 2006, bought the Château Souverain in Sonoma Valley, renamed it Francis Ford Coppola Winery, and relocated most of his operations there, other than the Rubicon vintages.
He’s said he wants to a capture the spirit of a warm, happy Italian family, like the one of his childhood Brooklyn home that revolved around festive family meals served with rich, fruity homemade wines.
With the skills of a philosopher, a poet, and even a psychiatrist, Coppola weaves eternal forms and complex human desires into epic stories of passion and greatness. Like a god of wine he’s intermingled the romance of wines, their distinct spirit of place, with their ancient heritage and their aliveness even as we drink-in those elixirs of the gods. Coppola’s theme, like all the Truly Greats, is life. His wineries are organized around the things of the soul, containing the spirit and the blueprint for another Golden Age.
© 2007-Suzanne de Cornelia. This may be reprinted on websites as long as the entire article, including email link and resource box are included, and unchanged.
The author’s romantic adventure novel, French Heart, set on wineries in Aix-en-Provence, France, and Santa Barbara will be released in 2008. Please sign up today for the book’s announcement list at americaninparisproject@yahoo.com
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